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The Rich Don’t Care about the Global Environment

When one niche in their global residence collection becomes victim of Global Change, as when rising seas impact their beachfront property, they can easily buy another similar residence in a secure environmental area. This too will be temporary, but “The rich don’t care about the future global environment.”

As an objective scientist, and cynical observer, it sometimes seems that I don’t care about the future either in many ways — it seems that everything is temporary, often cyclic; and me, my species and my planet are doomed regardless of what we do. Oh, we can make these changes happen sooner, like when we put the greenhouse gas CO2 into the atmosphere at an asymptotically increasing rate (a hockey stick graph), or later, like when we shift to non-polluting solar, wind or geothermal power.

But for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that we would like to give our progeny, our species, the maximum time to exist comfortably, and perhaps improve the specie’s intellectual capability. So we monitor our environment, to be knowledgeable about any threats to our future. Then when we discover a problem, we surely will act to correct it.

Something has gone wrong with this optimistic hypothesis. Several serious problems have been identified, and nothing is being done to prevent or rectify them. Several recent studies have identified a problem in our brain, that we have an inherent reaction to anything that threatens to disrupt our comfort; then to deny it and ignore it. Some can reason about this, and we all have the potential to over-ride this genetic tendency, but it is like an elephant plunging forward, with reason like a very small mahout sitting on top trying to change the beast’s direction. I certainly see this when I publish something about Climate Change observations; many commenters have a very strong genetic elephant in charge of their thinking.

Another scary mathematical model that has withstood the tests of peer review and verification studies is a study of the results of a greatly skewed wealth distribution on a civilization. This is an academic and NASA funded study (Motesharrei, Kalna & Rivas) that observes previous data (e.g. Sophisticated human civilizations, have collapsed in the past on a fairly regular basis. The Romans broke down, as did the Han in China and the Gupta in India, the Maya in Central America, and a variety of Mesopotamian civilizations), to find a correlation between skewed wealth distribution and cultural failure. When this model is projected into the future — same results for the terribly skewed wealth in the USA.

I’ll finish with a positive note: Another analyst, Herman Daly, former World Bank senior economist, and his colleagues suggest a “steady-state economy” that acknowledges the limits of our physical world. We can’t go on, they contend, endlessly depleting our stocks of natural resources and polluting the world with the wastes from our resource exploitation. (They suggest this is obvious, but the elephant in us doesn’t agree.) “We need,” says Daly, “to build the physical constraints of a finite biophysical environment into our economic theory.” And that theory, needs to build justice, too. Daly gave steps to change our fate, the principle one being: “Limit the range of inequality in income distribution with a minimum income and a maximum income. Rich and poor separated by a factor of 500,” Daly observes, “have few experiences or interests in common.”

Not even, the new NASA study suggests, avoiding a cataclysmic environmental collapse.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.